In a concise interview, Daniela Sozzi discusses the cybersecurity landscape of European fintechs compared with tier‑1 banks. She frames fintechs as both an opportunity and a threat: their agility and built‑in resilience can help them capture market share, yet their deep integration with traditional service providers exposes them to ecosystem‑wide attacks. Sozzi explains how this dynamic forces a shift from reactive, checklist‑driven security operations to proactive, preventive measures that rely on rapid, automated decision‑making. This operational shift impacts headcount, requiring more brain‑oriented staff, extensive training, and empowerment to act without waiting for top‑down instructions. She highlights that fintechs were designed from the ground up with ultra‑high uptime, redundant infrastructure, and flat, blended IT‑operations teams, offering a model that incumbent banks can emulate to improve speed, resilience, and overall cyber‑defense posture.
Chapters
Your experience on fintech, and we know that the fintech are more agile, can move quicker than the tier 1 banks. But on the other side, I think they may have less robust infrastructure or they have less capacity to protect themselves. See this as a threat, as an opportunity, or both?
It's a bit of both. And I'll focus particularly on the European fintechs because that's what I'm closest to. I think when it comes to cybersecurity, there is an opportunity because particularly the largest fintechs in Europe, to an extent, are actually perceived to be more agile and potentially more resilient. To cyberattacks. It could be an opportunity to win market share versus the incumbents, versus competitors that are more from the traditional side of the financial services. At the same time, it is also a threat because fintechs do not operate in a silo. They do not operate in a parallel world. They are interconnected. Oftentimes they are resellers of services that are produced by very traditional players. And because they are part of this ecosystem, an attack to the ecosystem is also a threat to the fintechs. And they know it. This enters in their risk assessments.
Okay, interesting. The key point with the velocity is the approach needs to be quicker, and that will have definitely an impact on the operation. What are actually the key impacts on headcount operational processes we can see with this new model?
So the first thing with processes, there is a shift from being reactive. It's about turning it on its head and it's about focusing more on preventative measures. Decision-making needs to be split from the automated solutions to prevent those attacks and to respond to the attacks quickly. This shapes operations, and I take a page from the book of military strategy. What do you do if your opponent no longer follows the rules of engagement, well, you need to adapt your strategy as well. So if it's a guerrilla type of warfare, you cannot deploy your battalion and count on numbers anymore. It's about being more agile. It's about being more responsive, and operations need to be shaped accordingly. There's a lot of training that goes into that. It's not something that can be improvised. And as far as financial services organisations are concerned, I think historically operations have been more hands-oriented as opposed to being brains-oriented. This is people waiting for instructions coming from the top or following through checklists. Well, that would not work in nowadays environment. So it's no longer numbers, but it's about quality. And empowerment follows through because there is no time to wait for instruction. So processes, operations, and headcount need to be adapted.
Going back, Daniela, on the fintech, do you see that also the ability to adapt themselves quicker than traditional institutions?
So if we think how fintechs were designed from scratch and how they started operating, they had from the start this challenge of being more exposed and having to guarantee uptime 99.999% of the time. They built their infrastructure with redundancy built in. Also, they built their organisation in a very agile way. So generally very flat organisations where the lines between operational capabilities and IT capabilities were quite blurred. And I think this is where experience and expertise can be shared, that traditional institutions can learn a lot by looking at the experience of the fintechs. That's probably the best way to respond to these types of threats going forward.
